How To Create a Custom Control
This guide will show you how to create a simple custom control with Avalonia UI.
Before you start to create your own control, you must decide which type of custom control you want to implement, the choices are:
- Custom Control
- Templated Custom Control
Custom Control
A custom control draws itself using the Avalonia UI graphics system, using basic methods for shapes, lines, fills, text, and many others. You can define your own properties, events and pseudo classes.
Some of the Avalonia UI built-in controls are like this. For example, the text block control (TextBlock class) and the image control (Image class).
Templated Custom Controls
A templated custom control creates a 'look-less' control that can be styled by themes or style dictionaries included in your project. The control has code for properties and events, and processing, but no properties or instructions about how to draw. A templated control defers to a theme or styles to select properties like brush colors, line thickness, corner radius etc. The drawing instructions are in the theme.
The majority of the Avalonia UI built-in controls are templated.
For guidance on how to create templated controls, see here.
The following pages show you how to create a simple custom control (inherited from Control).